My retirement fund that I just started was worth $15k in December of 2021. Then, May of 2022, our area was hit really hard. My retirement plan went down to $7k. Today, it’s worth $11k. I lost $4k on my retirement plan. It’s invested in total market funds, some tech, some big cap companies, and healthcare. But every sector has been ravaged by the stock market changes.
So if the market crashes the year before I want to retire I should just put off retiring for another 30 years.
Like one of the other replies mentioned, when you get closer to retirement, more of the money should get shifted from stocks to more stable but lower return investments like bonds and such that are not affected by a stock market crash. Usually you can set a retirement age in the management portal of your 401k and the management company in charge of your 401k uses it as a guide to move the money into the more stable investments.
Only 32% of people have 401k accounts.
45% of 18-29 year olds have a retirement account. That number keeps rising to 77% of people 60+ having a retirement account. source
You don’t need a 401k account to save for retirement. You can do this same savings/investing in an IRA or even an brokerage account (but you wouldn’t get the tax benefits). There are ZERO employer requirements to opening an IRA, you just have to be someone that earns money.
Earns enough money to set some aside for retirement.
Do you literally not even have $1 in your pocket that you earned for yourself? Thats all it takes to open an IRA and start saving for retirement.
You do understand a significant portion of the population doesn’t have a dollar to spare when they live paycheck to paycheck, right?
Listen friend, its entirely possibly you started off with good intentions in this thread, but somewhere along the line it looks like you got so concerned with “being right” or “getting zingers” that your responses got more and more useless and simply argumentative for arguments sake. I’m human, I’ve been there. Look where you started off this line of conversation with this:
The way I know you went down the wrong path is that if you were genuine with your argument, you would have started HERE with your comments about people not being able to save anything for retirement. Instead, you attacked a legitimate way to save for retirement for those that can save for retirement. Worse, you did so from a position of ignorance, but then attacked the response that informed you how your stated position was inaccurate.
The other possibility is that you started your whole rant without any thought to having a good faith conversation about the benefits or challenges to Americans saving for retirement. That would make you a straight up Troll. I don’t that thats who you are, so maybe just let this conversation thread die because its not producing anything productive for you and its otherwise a waste of time for everyone.
Or I completely disagree with the idea of individuals investing for their retirement as a base expectation when the options available are not universal nor affordable for half the population.
Your post comes across as dismissive of anyone criticizing the current system.
You should have a nest egg by then that even in a crash, a year of withdrawal isn’t significant
I’ll let the vast majority of Americans who can’t afford to save up a nest egg because of wealth inequality that they are doing it wrong.
Also the ones who choose to retire because of medical issues who have to spend any money not in a retirement account before insurance pays out that they did it right, but they are fucked anyway.
The system is shit even if there are ways for the well off to work around it.
Thats not how to do it. As you approach retirement age (5 to 10 years out), you move your money out of riskier (but higher return generating) stocks and into safer (but lower performing) investments like bonds or even cash (actual cash, CDs, Tbills, etc). Generally you also don’t move it ALL out of riskier stock. You don’t need 100% of your savings on day 1 of retirement, so you convert a few years worth (5 maybe?) to safe stuff and let the riskier stuff ride usually gaining more value even after you retire.
I don’t see what’s so difficult to understand. If you can’t retire at 60, try again at 90. At 120, you really should consider an alternative. If you have to wait until 150, retirement will likely be a lower-priority issue. \s
No. If you’ve been saving for 30 years, then you’ll have 30 years of accumulated 10±20% annual gains, which should be something like 16x your start, but could be 100x if you’re lucky or 1x if you’re not. Regardless, an historic crash on retirement day may take that down to 12x your start, which is still pretty good, and will be fixed by the following couple years.